


A Chance Encounter

by LoveChilde



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, Community: purimgifts, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 14:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3491945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveChilde/pseuds/LoveChilde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they meet again, they almost don’t realize it at first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Chance Encounter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumi/gifts).



> Happy Purim! Although this is future-fic, I tried to limit the spoilers to a bare minimum of reasonable speculation.

When they meet again, they almost don’t realize it at first. They cross each other’s path during the initial gathering, for a given value of ‘crossing’, but of course, neither one of them knows that the other is there. 

One is in the press of people; she knows them all, and she is known. Those she does not know, she is introduced to immediately. She is loved, even if her own ability to love, to trust, has long been frozen into something entirely different. Her laugh shimmers like the sun on a frozen pond, as fragile and brittle as the thin crust of ice she remembers running across as a child. 

“Poor Lady Sansa,” they say behind her back, “She’s been through so much, and even now, she has no peace.” She knows they say this, but she only agrees with them during her deepest moments of self pity, and those have become few and far between. All in all, she thinks she’s come out on top in all this, the years of upheaval. As far as she knows, she is the last of the Starks- the others have been dead or lost for years. The North has been abandoned to the Wild Men. But, at long last, there is peace. Sansa’s hand curves gently over her stomach, where a new Stark is growing, for all that he’ll be born to another family, with another name. She has no peace, not yet, but she has hope.

The other is removed from the crowd: she slips between shadows, seen yet invisible, moving between breathes, stepping between heartbeats. This is her first time back in King’s Landing in fifteen years, and she finds it nothing at all like she remembered, except for the people. She doesn’t bother scanning the crowd for familiar faces; those she cares about are dead, some by her own hand. Her list is shorter, these days. 

No one speaks about her or to her, no one notices her. That’s how it should be. 

When they come face to face, it is entirely by accident. One of them took a step to the side at the wrong time, the other slid around a pillar, and suddenly they are nose to nose. One of them is holding a knife; the other- a goblet, which tilts and sloshes watered wine over her sleeve at the sudden halt. 

For a moment, they stare at each other, frozen in silence. The knife is lowered, slowly.

“Don’t scream.” She makes to move away, to disappear, but a hand reaches out to stop her and she turned with a snarl, the knife rising again, “ _Don’t_!” 

“Arya- wait!” 

No one has called her that in fifteen years. She hasn’t been Arya in a very long time. Blinking, she allows her eyes to clear, to notice details of features, of clothing, to see more than just her target. 

“S-Sansa?” She’s known her sister wasn’t dead, but it was an abstract knowledge, and not something she cared about, really. Her past was dead to her. But this gave her pause, for a brief moment, and then, “I’m not here for you. Go. You never saw me.”

“But I _am_ seeing you.” Sansa took her in, the sister she thought has been dead for over a decade. Taller than her now, lanky, in nondescript dark clothes, and- “Arya, what’s happened to your hair? I almost didn’t recognize you.” Her sister’s hair is cropped short, and a pale, faded grey replaces what was once a muddy brown. 

Her smile is still the same, though, derisive, little teasing, “Fifteen years, and you still have problem with the way I do my hair.”

“I thought you were _dead_!” It’s a fierce whisper, a hand reaching out again as if Sansa would shake her. She slides away from the touch, light as air, smooth as water.

“It’s better that you keep thinking it. Arya is dead. There’s only me now.” She gave up the name, along with everything else, a long time ago. “Go, live your life, be happy. You’re not my target.” 

“You have...a target? Who?”

It’s against every rule, but the woman who was once Arya Stark gives her sister the name of her target. The woman who was once Sansa Stark thinks for a moment and nods. 

“You can get him?” A terse nod is all she gets in reply. “Good. Then do what you came here to do. I never saw you.” She can see her response startles her sister, and her own smile is bitter with years. “We’ve both changed, Arya. Go, finish your job. And come visit me afterwards.”

The other woman listens with shuttered eyes, concentrating. She nods once, sharply, and again disappears into the shadow. Sansa smiles, a flutter of hope growing strong in her, just over where the baby is. 

It is risky, of course, to give an assassin her address, but somehow, she knows Arya will come see her, this time without a knife at the ready.


End file.
